Work Exposures, Injuries, and Musculoskeletal Discomfort Among Children and Adolescents in Dairy Farming

ABSTRACT

Little research is available about the specifics of child or adolescent work on dairy farm operations. The objective of this study was to investigate work performed by children and adolescents on these operations. The authors administered mail questionnaires to a community-based, age- and operation size-stratified sample of individuals aged 6 to 18 (n = 240) who worked on dairy operations in Wisconsin. Data were collected in 1999. The 197 children and adolescents reported averaging 567 hours of dairy farm work in the last year (10.9 hours/week) and completed over 1/3 of all calf feeding, 1/5 of the milking, 1/5 of cow feeding, and 1/10 of tractor operation hours on their farm during the weeks they worked. Some of these young workers reported accomplishing duties also judged by some experts as hazardous work, including nearly half of the 9- to 11-year-olds driving tractors. Six nonfatal injuries were reported that required stopping work (14.6 per 100 full time equivalents per year), including those that required medical attention. Musculoskeletal discomfort and disability reports were unremarkable compared to existing studies of general and working populations. Wisconsin dairy farm youth appeared to be working no more hours per week than their peers in other studies of agricultural populations. Adolescents and some children largely performed the same range of tasks and often the same scope of work as adults, including some performing hazardous work. There is a need for further investigations with larger samples of dairy youth to confirm these findings. The exposures of very young workers to hazardous tractor driving and tower silo tasks suggest that there is an urgent need for improved and validated interventions to reduce these exposures.

KEYWORDS:

• Agriculture
• child labor
• dairy production
• injury control
• musculoskeletal discomfort
• occupational health
• safety

Part of this work was supported through a Childhood Agricultural Safety and Health Research Intervention Award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Federal Grant Identification Number R01/CCR 514357). The contents of this report are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Editorial assistance was rendered by Paula Volpiansky and Mark Purschwitz.